The Singapore-Washing Gambit for Chinese Tech Entrepeneurs
Thirteen examples before the Manus AI acquisition got nixed by Beijing
Singapore has a long history of being a convenient place for both Russian and Chinese companies to set up their global or regional headquarters. For AI companies like Manus, it offers the following specific benefits:
It’s easier for Chinese startups based in Singapore to attract Western investment capital
Access to Nvidia H100/H800 GPUs blocked under US export controls
Singapore’s 17% corporate tax, English-Mandarin bilingual workforce, and Southeast Asia market access
Frustration over China’s 2023–2024 VC environment (Tabcut founders cited months-long diligence)
While the Manus AI acquisition by Facebook is the latest example of this trend, I’ve identified thirteen other examples since 2023 that are contained in the downloadable spreadsheet, including hyperscale data center giant DayOne (spun out of GDS Holdings with nearly $4 billion raised), AI-for-pharma leaders Deep Intelligent Pharma and ChemLex, Temasek-backed enterprise AI platform Whale, conversational AI veterans Wiz.ai and AI Rudder, Tencent-pedigreed video generation startup Video Rebirth, AGI research outfit Sapient Intelligence, Vue.js creator Evan You's developer-tools company VoidZero, ex-Ele.me founders' consumer AI bet Orion Arm (Toki and Syft), e-commerce video tool TopviewAI, the Bloomberg-famous "Singapore-washing" poster child Tabcut, and the cautionary tale Megaspeed, now unraveling under US, Singaporean, and Malaysian investigations into alleged Nvidia GPU smuggling.
Russian firms who have moved to Singapore for some of the same reasons include Yandex, Acronis, and Group-IB.